I wrote recently about perspective. (See what I did there? I’m trying to make you look and improve my stickiness. (Oh, and I help my friends too.)

Anyway.. I’m in the end..or.. the beginning. A chapter is closing, a big fat major huge mega chapter. I’m ending my 13 year relationship. Right now I am in the thick of it, packing and moving out, negotiating and trying to get him to just split everything, and hoping we don’t have to spend most of what we’ve saved and what he earns on lawyers so that we can just end up splitting it down the middle anyway. I spend the afternoon and evening swimming in what’s left. It made me cry to see the beautiful home I’d made dismantling as I took down the pictures and packed up the art and games and kitchen stuff. I never ever thought it would ever come to this. I honestly believed we were ironclad, and then we weren’t.

I felt like I was drowning. I tried to talk to Peaches but she was on a date with Traveler, so I called Cleveland. It’s a risky move reaching out to the new beau. I asked him to just talk to me about anything and bless him, he did. He talked about his work and his blog and projects and guns. After a short bit, we were chit chatting amiably and I not longer felt like I was gasping.

I told him I didn’t want to blog about my night tonight when he asked me for topic suggestions for his blog. He selected one and I asked if he’d suggest a blog topic for me too, and he said “beginnings and possibilities”. I loved it. I’d been to dinner early with a friend and she commiserated about divorce, how she too had divorced her long time husband when she was my age. She talked about how she suddenly realized that this is good, how suddenly she could see that she didn’t know what would happen next or what could be, and eventually came to love the possibility in that.

I can do anything right now. I could go back to school. I could date anyone at all that I wanted or no one at all. It’s scary, belonging to nobody and having no scaffolding or anchor or harbor, but it’s dizzying too with possibility and promise. I’m standing in the ashes of my life.. having lost my home and love and pets and everything I built. I lived on an island just outside Seattle and now I live in Seattle, closer to my job. I lost my gym, my grocery, easy access to my friends, the people I rode the ferry with, my healthcare and therefore my doctor, my dentist, my pets, my grocery store, my routines, my habits- everything. The entirety of my life as I had been living it is suddenly and permanently gone.

I’m healthy and I have a good, if slightly low paying job. I have the blessing of good friends and Traveler and maybe something nice budding with Cleveland. I have my metamours and the things I am salvaging from my old life. I have the ability to make friends and I have my sobriety. It’s not nothing. It’s a good start. I am not alone. I have a lot of support if I remember to reach out to it. I have been here before, starting over. Hell, I was a Navy wife for 13 years and a soldier for 7 before that. I’ve been moving and living military life for 20 years. The four years I lived in my home were the longest I’ve lived anywhere in my entire adult life. I am fucking great at starting over. I don’t know what anything means yet or what will happen next, and it is full of fear and loss and pain, but IT’S ALSO FULL of promise and opportunity.

I can create a schedule for myself that includes anything. I can use my time any way I’d like. I can use the 39 days of leave I have from work in any way I wish. I can go back to school. It’s scary, but it’s exciting too. I think I’d like to pursue creative stuff like writing and painting and welding. I might even look into doing some community theater. I’d like to hit a swing club, mostly because I have always wanted to and have always had someone saying I shouldn’t. Fuck that. I’d like to paint my bedroom the color I painstakingly picked for my last bedroom, and I’d like to hang wayyyy too much art all over the walls, because I have it and I fucking want to. I’d like to see Montana and I’d like to go to Portland, because Hubby and I kept planning and cancelling our trip. I’d like to pierce my clitoral hood and get another tattoo, because I fucking can. I think I’d like to buy a little house some day and have lots of built in bookshelves and a workshop for all my pursuits.

I want to learn to dance, maybe salsa or something fun. I’d like to eat better and lose more weight. I’d like to spend more time with friends and be open.. really open.. to the universe around me. I’d like to take a trip somewhere.. volunteer tourism, spaying cats in Greece or digging a well in Botswana. I’d like to ride a motorcycle through absolutely nothing, far from the interstate, maybe with a partner or a few friends. I want to spend some of my inheritance on a trip somewhere, and I’d like to go to some kind of hippy-dippy retreat like a tantra workshop or an artist enclave. Like my commiserating friend from last night, who isn’t poly but lives openly, I’d like to do the things I’d like to do that I always put off because I didn’t want to selfishly spend the time or money to do x or y because I had to think of HIM. I’d like to respect and think of others, but I’d like to be open to the plethora of options the world holds.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end. It is sadness and loss and pain and fear and sometimes I feel like I’m drowning with the fucking tragedy of it, but then I can turn just a little.. a slightly change in the view and I see that it is also a wide open field and I have no idea what will happen next or where I’ll go or what I’ll be doing, and I can marvel in that. Four years ago today my boyfriend’s girlfriend and I were both watching fireworks from rooftops in Seattle on buildings across the street from each other. We were both monogamously married and newly arrived in Seattle. We didn’t know each other and could never have conceived that we’d divorce, become open, date the same guy, bond and watch the fireworks together at his house tonight. The world is a tremendously wide place with so many people and things in it. Today, I’m beginning.

In 2011, I declared my entire life a “do-over.” I was single again, I had just gotten out of a bad condo situation, and was considering changing jobs. I was actually living in my brother’s spare bedroom with my stuff in storage, contemplating what should happen next.

That’s exactly when I got the offer to go work in Germany for three years.

You never know what might happen next, SPG. Sometimes a clean slate is a fantastic starting point for something new.

(and on a less philosophical note, I want to see Portland too. It’s been on my geographic to-do list for ages now.)